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Sunday, August 9, 2015

A STERLING WOMAN IS SHE

Sue Margolis unfurls
a broad canvas in LOSING ME. She does it with elegantly and with
bravado. Much as Pieter Bruegel the Elder's paintings of peasant
life in Renaissance Europe, her novel compels the reader to look
at beyond the sunny spaces and joyful feasts to find the dark corners
most of us would prefer to ignore. In this, she is as fearless as her
main character, 58 year-old special needs teacher Barbara Srirling—a
telling name, that--who never misses an opportunity to do battle for
a good cause, unless it is to save her own life.

Margolis bestows
upon Barbara Sthe gift of illuminating numerous aspects of today's
human experience—a war veteran's post-traumatic syndrome and its
affect on his family, the terrors of approaching old age, the
question of professional identity, the struggle of the economic
underclasses, the dual burden of ageing adults who care for boomerang
children and fragile elderly parents, the pitfalls of long term
relationships, the matter of fidelity. The global environment, the
class system, the callous attitude of politicians, violence against
children and women. As abstractions, these make up an incongruous
mix. In real life, which Margolis portrays deftly, it is all in a
day's work.

LOSING ME is about
more than travails and causes. It is about a woman whois trying to
find her way through a complex world. Barbara is feisty and wimpy,
caring and full of anger, clear eyed and obtuse, agentle and savage
at the same time. So are real people.

Humor is an
important element in LOSING ME. It can be tongue in cheek, such as
Barbara's responses the social media, “Barbara's Facebook sidebar
contained another 'fifty-nine next birthday' ad for 'cheap, no fuss
funeral plan. Underneath was an invitation to take part in a medical
trial aimed at detecting early-onset Alzheimer's. Then there were
the plus-size clothing outlets pushing New Year's discounts.
Zuckerberg knew she was a size fourteen because he had elves….peering
over her shoulder as she typed.” She segues with an acerbic
comment on another Facebook ad, “Cruises no matter why they were
taken, were the first sign of the dying of the light and to be fought
at all costs. (Elasticized waistbands, on the oter hand, had, since
the arrival of her ample post-menopausal belly, become her secret
pleasure.) “

Determined as she is
to mock Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg—she eventually reaches
the point where she replaces the Z in his surname with an F—Barbara
is rather slow at directing her bile at those who really desrve it,
such as horrible husband Frank. the typical humanitarian who is
willing to risk life and limb to bring attention to so-called plight
of the Palestinians, but who is incapable of engaging with
individuals. He can make movies that show the suffering of poor
people in the Third World, but close up, his self-absorption is
staggering, his indifference to his wife's ill health and concerns is
staggering. The best he can do when Barbara asks for his support
during a crisis is to say,

“You are such a
drama queen.”

Unlike her best
friend Jean, Barbara does not seek solace in the embraces of paid
escorts. No, she soldiers on, helping her narcissistic mother whose
all encompassing love of her damaged husbnd, war veteran Stan,
leaves no room for the needs of wee little Barbara, thus shaping her
into a dual-personality fighter for rights of neglected children
abused women even as she herself endures her husband's neglect and
the bad behavior of her supremely entitled son. Her relationship
with her daughter Jess is only marginally better. It involve
self-sacrifice of the sort her own mother, Rose, refused to make for
her. There, is one of the flaws in LOSING ME, in this not-subtle
shades, no gradations the cliché mom who “never needed to work.”

To make Rose, who
is as much a victim of the horrors of war as her PSTD afflicted
husband, the cause of Barbara's inadequacies, is an error of
judgment. It leads the reader to ask Margolis from whom Barbara got
her love of social causes and her strength. Surely it was not her
teacher, Mrs. Emmett, who saw her for a few hours during the day. To
attribute it to a reaction to her mother's perceived neglect and
alleged narcissism is way too facile and convenient.

A story that has so
much realism fails when it lapses into the usual “mommie made me
do it” mode. It fails when it does not provide a source for the
main character's ferocious criticism of “hummusy mummies” who
own Kegel balls, exchange air kisses, babble about their Christmas
trips to Tuvalu, feed their kids breast milk parfaits, name their
kids Atticus and Bryony and use—I will not go there—family
cloth. The reader wonders to know why such a sterling characters
compassion and understanding only extends to those materially poorer
than she.

The imperfections
in LOOSING ME are no reason to dismiss the excellent writing in most
of of it. There are moments when Margolis makes excessive demands on
plausibility—Rose, who “only loved Stan,” Barbara's lightning
fast bonding with an abused, low-income woman and children, and her
swift insertion into the deliberations of a wealthy family all have
a fairytale air. But all in all, this is a story told honestly and
with brio.

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